Building Brazil’s national cybersecurity curriculum – Increasing teachers’ and schoolchildren’s resilience to cyber threats. 

Summary

This project is part of the United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) commitment to build national cyber security capacity and resilience to cybersecurity threats in five middle-income countries. The UK Government’s Digital Access Programme provides support through: Government-to-Government technical assistance; cyber hygiene training; public awareness-raising; and research. It aims to reduce the impact of cyber harms on their governments, economies and citizens – particularly amongst groups vulnerable to online exploitation.

Details

Aim

With Tonica, a Brazilian communications agency, and SaferNet, a Brazilian NGO that focuses on cyber education and human rights violations, the aim was to increase consistency and effectiveness of digital skills teaching in Brazilian schools and to support Brazil’s Ministry of Education and partner State Secretariats for Education.

Context

When Brazil launched its first ever national cybersecurity strategy, one of its main objectives was to improve cyber awareness and education across the country. Young children are exposed to any number of cyber harms but by improving their cyber awareness while at school, the government wanted to help them securely navigate cyberspace, recognising potential risks and knowing how to avoid them.

Outcomes

• Curriculum piloted successfully across 3 states leading to increased knowledge and understanding of safe cyber practices in these states.
• Curriculum launched on Brazil’s Ministry of Educations national platforms which has the potential, to be applied by all 197,500 Brazilian schools increasing the resilience to cyber threats of some 52 million school children.

Outputs

• Toolkit designed based on evidence of teachers’ and pupils’ experiences of online harms plus current teaching materials and gaps
• A beta version of the toolkit, tested with schools in the pilot states, and a full launch version, incorporating teachers’ feedback from the pilot phase
• Increased awareness of teachers and government stakeholders
• Recommendations on how to generate future iterations of the toolkit

Activities

• Research with schools in three states; Pernambuco, Bahia and Brazil’s Federal District to understand the cyber harms children face and the barriers teachers encounter when trying to deliver cyber education. This helped determine the toolkit content.
• Development and testing of the toolkit beta version with teachers
• Full launch of toolkit to all schools via the three states’ educational platforms. The toolkit, which featured 40 hours of lesson plans and support materials, spread across five themed modules, was then made available on the Education Ministry’s national platforms.
• Creation of a communications campaign to raise awareness of the toolkit’s availability among teachers
• Assessment of future cyber trends, to be incorporated when updating the toolkit materials in future years